Author: James Clark
As a digital marketing agency, creating custom reports for your clients in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) helps them make sense of their web analytics data. Done correctly, it also highlights the excellent results you’re delivering and gets you buy-in for your recommendations.
But, with GA4 offering a range of customization options as well as bespoke “explorations,” it isn’t a case of one-size-fits-all. Here’s what to consider when creating custom reports, both from a business and a technical perspective, so that your clients can get a clear overview of how you’re moving their business forward.
Table of contents:
Why agencies create custom GA4 reports for clients
If you’re already up to speed with GA4, you know that it comes with a suite of pre-made reports (that are personalized based on the business objectives selected when the property was set up):
For example, if you or your client selected “Generate leads” when creating the property, GA4 will show reports relating to traffic acquisition, landing pages, and user attributes.
So, as an agency providing SEO or other digital services, why should you create custom reports for your client? Because the standard reports almost certainly won’t give your client exactly what they need. Instead, they’ll provide:
Too much information—overwhelming the client
Too little information—frustrating the client
The wrong information—confusing the client
Custom reporting also lets you guide the narrative, encouraging your client to focus on important business metrics (such as conversions) instead of irrelevant ‘vanity metrics’ that may get highlighted in one-size-fits-all reporting. This, in turn, encourages your client to focus on the impact of the work you do for them—or the potential benefit of the work you are proposing.
Before you start to build a report, think about your client. The report is for their benefit after all. Here’s what you need to consider (I’ll cover them in detail in the sections that follow):
Your stakeholder
The business’s requirements
Your client’s data literacy
Identify your stakeholders
Who will sign off on your reports? And who will reference it on a day-to-day basis? These two groups are often not the same. (A senior stakeholder may want a report containing everything but the kitchen sink, then never look at it again.)
Also identify the departments that will use your reports. If the report is for sales and marketing, for example, it’s likely that these two departments have different but overlapping requirements. Should you build one report that meets both teams’ needs or create two separate reports? One report may become cluttered, but two reports may require more work to build and maintain.
With these sorts of questions, there’s often no right or wrong—simply a balance to achieve.
Understand the business requirements
Once you’ve identified your stakeholders, work with them to understand their requirements and nail down the specifics of the report. Requirements vary widely, but every report needs:
A purpose. This could be to inform a strategic decision, to assess the impact of a marketing campaign, to provide the sales team with actionable information, etc.
A link to business goals. There must be a clear connection between the purpose of the report, the measurable objectives of the site, and the wider goals of the business. For example, if the purpose of a report is to assess the impact of a marketing campaign, that marketing campaign should support an objective such as increasing retention rate, which in turn should connect to a business goal (perhaps related to growth or profitability).
If the report doesn’t have a purpose, nobody will use it. If the purpose doesn’t link to a business objective, stakeholders may look at it but they will waste their time doing so.
Understand your client’s data literacy
Your stakeholders’ data literacy is the final consideration—how comfortable are they at interpreting graphs and understanding the stories that reports tell?
Stakeholders with lower data literacy will need simpler reports that tell simpler stories. Multi-page dashboards (like the one in the example below) look impressive, but they are likely to frighten more than enlighten:
Once the report is finished, plan a handover meeting to ensure that stakeholders can access the report in GA4 as well as interpret it correctly. If you don’t, it won’t get used.
Create custom reports based on GA4’s standard reports
Before you build a completely bespoke report, it’s worth looking at the standard reports to see if you can tweak one of these to give your client(s) what they need.
Standard reports in GA4 are organized into “collections.” These are the top-level menu items in the Reports section (e.g., “Business objectives,” “Life cycle”):
Reports themselves can either be “overview” reports or “detail” reports:
Overview reports consist of a number of small summary “cards”
Detail reports go into more depth on one particular area
The reason for going over this structure is that you can edit it at every level. GA4 lets you publish and unpublish collections, change which reports are in a collection, swap around the cards in an overview, or customize a detail report by adding a filter or new metric.
Note: Before we proceed, you need to have the Administrator or Editor role to customize your reporting in GA4. If you don’t, many of the options I mention below will be unavailable.
How to customize report navigation
At the top level, you can customize the report navigation by publishing and editing collections. This is also useful if the wrong business objectives were selected when the GA4 property was initially configured.
Keep in mind that any changes you make here will affect everyone with access to that GA4 property. To customize your report navigation in GA4:
01. Go to Reports > Library.
02. To publish a collection (e.g. “Life cycle”), click on the three dots to open the action menu and select Publish.
03. To edit a published collection, click on the three dots and select Edit.
04. Drag and drop reports from the panel on the right into the collection on the left.
05. Click Save.
How to customize standard GA4 reports
Customize reports either from the Library or by going to the report itself and selecting the pencil icon in the top right.
If you’re customizing an overview report, you can add and remove cards, or reorder them by dragging them around:
If you’re customizing a detail report, you can add and remove metrics and dimensions, change visualizations, and apply a filter that affects everything on the report.
For example, a client of mine wanted the “Pages and Screens” report to only show information on the main domain (and not any subdomains). I achieved this by adding a filter where Hostname exactly matched the main domain:
When you finish customizing and click Save, you’ll have the option either to save the changes to the existing report or as a new report. This can be useful if you edit a report for one stakeholder but others were happy using the original.
Options for sharing reports
Your customized report is available to everyone with access to the GA4 property, but you can point stakeholders in the right direction by sending them a direct link to the report. Do this by going to the report, clicking on the share icon in the top right, and then Share link:
In this same menu, you can select Schedule Email to send the report out as a PDF or CSV. You can even set a schedule to automate monthly report sharing for up to 12 months (like in the example below):
There’s one limitation here—you can only set the report to go out to users that have access to the GA4 property. If you want to give access only to a subset of data, consider a different solution, such as a Looker Studio dashboard (which I cover in the “advanced techniques” section later).
Google Analytics 4: Reports vs. Explorations
In addition to the standard reports, GA4 offers “explorations”: custom reports you put together yourself by combining dimensions and metrics along with optional filters and segments.
Explorations are great for exploring data (as their name suggests)—either to answer questions or discover insights. However, there’s nothing stopping you from building read-only explorations for your clients so they can monitor their KPIs.
While standard reports contain a number of components all on one screen, explorations consist of one or more “tabs” (a bit like Excel) with a single visualization on each. This means explorations are often the better choice if you want to convey important information clearly and simply:
Explorations offer a number of visualization techniques, from the simple table through to funnels, paths, and segment overlaps (as shown in the image above).
You will see these techniques in GA4’s standard reports too, but only in specific circumstances. For example, funnels appear in some of the eCommerce reports. Explorations let you use visualizations to answer a wider range of questions, making them more flexible than the standard reports.
One other benefit of explorations is that you don’t need to be an account Administrator or Editor to create them. The feature is also available to users with the more restricted Marketer or Analyst roles.
In this section, I’ll walk you through creating an exploration, using (as our example) an exploration that helps to identify the source of spam traffic. We’ll consider the limitations of explorations and finally see how to share explorations with your clients.
How to create explorations in GA4
GA4 offers seven exploration templates (AKA “techniques”). Each one lends itself to a different kind of analysis. For example, if your focus is on user journeys then choose the “Path Exploration” technique. If you have an eCommerce client and are looking at average lifetime value, then choose the “User lifetime” technique.
To create an exploration, go to Explore in GA4’s left-hand navigation menu. Here you can start with either a blank exploration or one of the seven techniques:
Choosing one of the techniques gives you an example report (with the relevant metrics and dimensions already included). There’s also a link to a template gallery that contains a few extra templates for specific use cases and industries.
You can also start with a blank exploration, choose a technique from the dropdown menu within the builder, and add your own metrics and dimensions from scratch.
There’s one other way to create an exploration, and that’s to convert one of GA4’s detail reports. Go to the report you are interested in and click on the Export this report to analysis button in the top-right. Each element in the report will appear as a separate tab in the exploration.
GA4 automatically saves all explorations you create, even if you don’t name them or edit them. So if you’re clicking in and out of the different techniques available to you, your Explore section will soon contain lots of blank or default reports (shown below):
Delete these as you go along, otherwise it may be difficult to find the genuine reports you want to share with your clients later on.
Also, come up with a naming convention that makes sense to both you and your clients: there’s no way to sort your explorations into folders, you can only browse and search by name. This means how you name your explorations is all-important.
Example: Identify spam traffic in GA4 with explorations
Let’s take a common scenario: You’ve noticed a spike in users on a particular day, and suspect it’s spam traffic. How can you use an exploration to find out where the traffic is coming from and whether it’s spam? Once you know that, you can filter it out from GA’s standard reports and save your client from some confusion in the future.
Go ahead and create a blank exploration. This defaults to the “free-form” technique, and the “table” visualization:
Explorations, like GA4’s other reports, consist of metrics (that have a number value) and dimensions (that have a text value). Before you can add dimensions and metrics to an exploration, you need to “import” them so they are available to use. Let’s import our metrics first:
01. Under METRICS, click +.
02. Click on Search metrics and start typing “Users.”
03. Tick Total users.
04. Click on Search metrics again and start typing “Sessions.”
05. Tick Sessions.
06. Click Import.
Now do the same for DIMENSIONS, but this time import the dimension First user source / medium. This shows you how users landed on your website or app for the first time. For example, did you acquire them from “google / organic” or perhaps “Youtube.com / referral”?
The final stage is to build your exploration:
01. Double-click on your dimension to add it to the exploration.
02. Double-click on each of the two metrics to add them, too.
03. Choose your date range using the date picker in the top-left.
In the panel on the right, you’ll see a table breaking down sessions and users on that day by their first user source. See if you can notice anything strange in my example:
My top source for users was referrals from “urlumbrella.com,” but these users aren’t generating any sessions (as you would normally expect). This strange behavior is a clear indicator of programmatic spam traffic rather than genuine human visitors.
So I’ve uncovered the source of my traffic spike—but if this didn’t work, I could try swapping out some different metrics or dimensions. Perhaps the traffic all came from the same city, another common indicator of spam.
The limitations of explorations
Although explorations are more flexible than GA4’s standard reports, they do have limitations. Here are four limitations to be aware of:
01. Can’t sort by dimension: GA4 lets you sort table visualizations by metric but not by dimension. What does that mean in practice? Let’s say you have a simple exploration with a dimension of Day (from 1 to 31) and a metric of Views:
You can sort by views, from high to low (or from low to high). This will show you which days received the most views (as in the image above). But you can’t sort by day to show days 1 to 31 in consecutive order.
This can make it more difficult to work with some time-related dimensions in explorations than in standard reports. One workaround is to export the data and sort it in Excel.
02. No annotations: Annotations were a popular feature in Universal Analytics (before GA4) that let you leave explanatory notes on specific data points. Perhaps tracking broke on a particular day, or a campaign launched—seeing this as an annotation would provide useful context for the data.
Unfortunately, the annotation feature hasn’t made it across to GA4. There’s currently no way to add annotations (or commentary in general) to an exploration to help your client understand what they are looking at. This is also an issue with the standard reports, but feels like more of an omission with explorations because they are custom.
03. Data retention: User-level and event-level data in GA4 gets deleted at the end of its retention period. For free GA4 accounts, this period is either two months or fourteen months (depending on your setting under Admin > Data Retention):
Explorations won’t show you data outside this period. On the other hand, GA4’s standard reports are based on aggregated data tables so they aren’t affected by this restriction.
04. No automated scheduling. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get a sharing link for an exploration or schedule it to go out via email. This is one way that explorations are less flexible than standard reports.
How to share explorations with your clients
To share your exploration, click on the “three dots” menu icon alongside it and select Share:
This will make the exploration available to any other user with access to the property. However, only the original owner can edit the exploration; for other users, it will be read-only.
If your client wants to make changes to an exploration you’ve built (such as choosing a different time period, for example) they will need to duplicate it first. This new copy will belong to them and they can edit it (but you can’t). Although this is restrictive, it does prevent your client from accidentally breaking or deleting explorations you’ve built for them.
As I mentioned above, there’s no way to get a share link for an exploration. If you’re sharing an exploration with your client, I suggest emailing them to let them know that it’s now available to them in their GA4 property. Alternatively, you could make note of the exploration within a handoff or resource document for the client.
Advanced custom reporting techniques
Now that you know the basics of customizing standard reports and creating custom explorations in GA4, here are two advanced techniques to further impress your clients:
Curating reports over time
Analyzing GA4 data in other tools
Curate your reports over time
You’ve produced a report for your client based on their requirements and made sure they are comfortable using it. That’s not the end of the journey. Over time, your client’s requirements will evolve, their data literacy may improve, stakeholders themselves could join or leave.
It’s worthwhile to check in with clients periodically to ensure that reports are still delivering value. Often, a client who spends time with a report will find that it triggers new questions that require further analysis.
And, don’t be afraid to delete or unshare reports that are no longer relevant: keep the reporting as uncluttered as possible, so clients can easily find what they need.
Analyze GA4 data in other tools
Custom reporting in GA4 has one large restriction I haven’t mentioned yet: you can only report on data that is either collected in GA4 or pulled from a few specific Google sources (e.g., Google Search Console).
In reality, your client may have many different sources of data. Thinking just about marketing, that may include data from social media, email newsletters, and even offline activity such as trade shows. Bringing all this data together in one report can be highly insightful. For example, do your client’s direct mail campaigns correlate with increased website revenue?
This is where a data visualization or business intelligence tool comes in. Many GA4 users gravitate towards Looker Studio, because (like GA4) it is free—plus it has official connectors to Google Analytics and most other Google products. You can add your offline data to Google Sheets and pull it in that way:
Building a dashboard in Looker Studio or a BI tool such as Tableau also overcomes some of the GA4 limitations we looked at earlier. For example, you can add commentary and annotations to your dashboard to contextualize the data for your client. It’s also possible to sort your data by dimension (such as “Day”) as well as metric:
Data retention was another limitation I talked about. To get around this, you can use the free link between GA4 and BigQuery, Google’s cloud-based data warehouse. Your user and event data is safe from automatic deletion in BigQuery.
However, working with your client’s data in BigQuery isn’t as straightforward as working directly in GA4, as you’ll have to query it with SQL. But, when it comes to visualization, one option is to use the BigQuery connector in Looker Studio and build your client’s report there.
Deliver relevant insights and showcase your value with custom GA4 reports
As you consider which approach to take with your reporting, remember to always put the focus on the client. There’s no point building an insightful dashboard in Looker Studio if they log into GA4 every day and don’t want to have to grapple with another platform.
Whether your report relates to search performance or a different marketing area, focus on clarity, simplicity, and ease of use. That way, you stand the best chance of providing reporting that actually gets used—delivering business value and reflecting well on you as a trusted partner.
James Clark is a web analyst from London, with a background in the publishing sector. When he isn't helping businesses with their analytics, he's usually writing how-to guides over on his website Technically Product. Twitter | Linkedin